It is not respect for character, seeing that we often respect people heartily without being able to enjoy their society. It is a mysterious suitableness or adaptability, and how mysterious it is may be in some degree realized when we reflect that we cannot account for our own preferences. I try to explain to myself, for my own intellectual satisfaction, how and why it is that I take pleasure in the society of one very dear friend. He is a most able, honorable, and high-minded man, but others are all that, and they give me no pleasure. My friend and I have really not very much in common, far less than I have with some perfectly indifferent people. I only know that we are always glad to be together, that each of us likes to listen to the other, and that we have talked for innumerable hours. Neither does my affection blind me to his faults. I see them as clearly as if I were his enemy, and doubt not that he sees mine. There is no illusion, and there has been no change in our sentiments for twenty years.
As a contrast to this instance I think of others in which everything seems to have been prepared on purpose for facility of intercourse, in which there is similarity of pursuits, of language, of education, of every thing that is likely to permit men to talk easily together, and yet there is some obstacle that makes any real intercourse impossible. What the obstacle is I am unable to explain even to myself. It need not be any unkind feeling, nor any feeling of disapprobation; there may be good-will on both sides and a mutual desire for a greater degree of intimacy, yet with all this the intimacy does not come, and such intercourse as we have is that of simple politeness. In these cases each party is apt to think that the other is reserved, when there is no wish to be reserved but rather a desire to be as open as the unseen obstacle will allow. The existence of the obstacle does not prevent respect and esteem or even a considerable degree of affection. It divides people who seem to be on the most friendly terms; it divides even the nearest relations, brother from brother, and the son from the father. Nobody knows exactly what it is, but we have a word for it,—we call it incompatibility. The difficulty of going farther and explaining the real nature of incompatibility is that it takes as many shapes as there are varieties in the characters of mankind.
Sympathy and incompatibility,—these are the two great powers that decide for us whether intercourse is to be possible or not, but the causes of them are dark mysteries that lie undiscovered far down in the “abysmal deeps of personality.”
ESSAY II.
INDEPENDENCE.
There is an illusory and unattainable independence which is a mere dream, but there is also a reasonable and attainable independence not really inconsistent with our obligations to humanity and our country.
The dependence of the individual upon the race has never been so fully recognized as now, so that there is little fear of its being overlooked. The danger of our age, and of the future, is rather that a reasonable and possible independence should be made needlessly difficult to attain and to preserve.
The distinction between the two may be conveniently illustrated by a reference to literary production. Every educated man is dependent upon his own country for the language that he uses; and again, that language is itself dependent on other languages from which it is derived; and, farther, the modern author is indebted for a continual stimulus and many a suggestion to the writings of his predecessors, not in his own country only but in far distant lands. He cannot, therefore, say in any absolute way, “My books are my own,” but he may preserve a certain mental independence which will allow him to say that with truth in a relative sense. If he expresses himself such as he is, an idiosyncrasy affected but not annihilated by education, he may say that his books are his own.